The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders

Let me preface this review by saying that despite his ostensible fame—Genius Grant and all that—I’d never heard of George Saunders (or at least not insofar as I remembered him the next day). Taking as gospel his skill as a writer of fiction, his political savvy, poetic sensibility, &c., we must invariably turn to this, his first attempt at a collection of essays.

I am not impressed.

Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Saunders’ premises: the title essay is about how cultural discourse has become so watered down and irrelevant that making political or social choices is like choosing Pepsi as opposed to Coke. The rest of the essays are similarly charged, usually pretty left-leaning. Regardless, he makes good points; especially interesting is his trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which is genuinely interesting travel/political writing.

But here’s my issue with Saunders, especially considering all the plaudits he has for his political sensibility and his nuanced craft: he’s not a very good nonfiction writer. His serious essays are generally teases, scraping the first few feet of a very deep issue, hinting at its subtext without ever really plumbing its depths. I invariably compare any essayist to David Foster Wallace, who manages to take any issue and run it through a gauntlet to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. I kept waiting for Saunders to start making better points, but it never came—only reiterations of the problem’s description, like that hack Seinfeld. “And what’s the deal with political discourse?”

Saunder’s satire is unbearably heavy-handed. It’s like somebody making a bad joke and then elbowing you conspicuously and saying “Get it? Eh? Eh?” Where’s the subtlety? If I want obvious political jokes, I’ll watch Real Time With Bill Maher, who’s much funnier.

One of these days, I’ll need to give Saunder’s fiction a try: it’s very possible I’ll be blown away by his talent. But I would advise him to stick to fiction, because honestly his essays just aren’t any good. Not recommended.

When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden by Bill Maher

In the sort-of wake of September 11^th, when the hurt was still fresh and before our incursion into Iraq had turned the ‘War on Terror’ into a Benny Hill sketch with Ak-47s, Bill Maher, still stinging from being booted from ABC (a move which, admittedly, should be irksome to anyone who cares remotely about free speech), penned this screed against lazy patriots (i.e., the kind who are willing to stick 10 flags on their SUV, but not willing to drive the SUV any less).

I like Bill Maher, but I’m sometimes irritated by his tendency to deliver his pop-wisdom one-liners with a gravitas usually reserved for Stone Phillips. It comes off as spurious and condescending. The damnedest part is that Maher makes good points; really good points, even if I don’t agree with all of them. But this is hardly a good format for it: a short throwaway book that mixes in jokes at inopportune times. Maher doesn’t have the “I’m kidding, but not really” sort of schtick down like, say, Al Franken does.

In 2007, after Dubya has publicly decried—though not acted upon—the US’s dependence on foreign oil, the idea seems, like soooo 5 minutes ago. When Maher wrote this in 2003, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, our dependence upon oil from the Middle East was an integral part of the problem, it was still a somewhat fresh idea. He comments upon, and I distinctly remember this being so, the fact that the American sense of entitlement is so great that being asked to give up anything, be it oil or otherwise, is tantamount to treason. “If I don’t drive this Hummer to work, then the terrorists win!”

There is one way in which this book is now dated, I feel, and that is Maher’s emphasis on nation security. He more or less states, clearly, that the role of the government is to ensure nation security, no matter what the cost. With all the shit that’s gone on in the last four years, I’m almost positive he’s not saying that now. Something I think he’s probably still lobbying for are intelligent profiling of suspects (which I agree with, though I think he’s too glib with the arguments against).

But the crux of the book, in a very general way, is that the war we’re fighting now is very different from the ones that our grandparents fought: Maher’s clever alteration of WWII-era propaganda posters (e.g. “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler”) underscores the notion of personal sacrifice that emboldened “the greatest generation” but by stark contrast, seems almost anathema today. “Conservation is for pussy-footing lib’ruls: real Americans guzzle gas and eat McDonald’s 3 times a week, the way God intended!” It’s all good and fine to say that we support the troops, but all we’re really doing is either calling for them to come home, or saying in no uncertain terms that calling for them to come home is the same as calling for them to lose.

It seems a shame that this book is as short and insubstantial as it is, and that it got so little attention, because it has a lot to say. But, I’m afraid, it is also extremely dated, a mere four years after its initial publications. That’s the world of politics for you.

The Buried Book by David Damrosch

I’m far from being a historical scholar; I’ve only read Gilgamesh once, and that was years ago. In fact, my interest in history lies more in the development of Northern and Western Europe (linguistics, primarily). Still and all, when I read the premise of this book, I was compelled to give it a try. There are, I imagine, a lot of interesting things that can be said about the discovery, translation, and impact of one of the oldest narratives that we know of.

With some regret, though, I must admit that Damrosch’s book left me cold. Ostensibly about the tale of Gilgamesh itself, the book actually makes very little mention of Gilgamesh, beginning with a broad overview of its rediscovery by British and French archaeologists excavating at Ninevah, but the entire middle of a book is a rambling hash of biographies of important figures like George Smith. These people are undoubtedly critical in the rediscovery of the tablets upon which Gilgamesh was written, but I don’t care about their time spent as ambassadors in Abyssinia. If The Buried Book had managed to accomplish it’s stated goal, I would not be so perturbed by the excess of this tangential trivia, but it seems like Damrosch spent much more time with silly speculation about the state of mind of Assyrian kings and much less time bothering to draw connections between the meaning of this historical epic.

One fact which I did find fascinating was that Gilgamesh, insofar as it contains references to a great “Deluge” which destroyed most of the earth, was thought to be a confirmation of the story of Genesis and the great flood which Noah survived. There are other biblical references in the book, too. When it was first discovered, and when the cuneiform was finally deciphered, the impetus to prove the Bible correct was responsible for much of the initial funding to continue excavations in what is now Iraq. This stuff is food for thought, but there was sadly very little of it.

Writing a conversational sort of book about a “dry” subject takes not just impeccable research, but a lot of stylistic flair. I always point to Bill Byron as someone who gets this sort of thing right: there is a target mix of tabloid and textbook. I appreciate Damrosch’s work on this book, but he needs to brush up on his skills a bit before I’d bother to read anything else by him.

Several weeks ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associates maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read accounts like Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Iraq from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion, and its message seems congruent with the cries that have been heard since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. The most important “string”—to borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in the story of Iraq’s fall is the similarities to the ailing Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003, but it was many years in the making—arguably as far back as the original Gulf War. At that time, the first President Bush had foregone a removal of Hussein from power, noting that an invasion of Baghdad would have forced the United States into a position of control in Iraq, alienating Arab allies in the region and generally precipitating a disaster of every conceivable sort—a possibly “barren outcome” (Bush and Scowcroft 489). Bush Senior’s reaction to Iraq was a measured response that sought to establish a precedent for international aggression, a policy fresh from the lessons of the Cold War and Soviet belligerence. In fact, the United Nations was continuing this admittedly cautious policy in 2003, when it refused support for President George W. Bush’s intended invasion of Iraq, supposedly to relieve Hussein of his nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs, no evidence of which had been found at that time by Hans Blix and his team of U.N. weapons inspectors. To date, no evidence of recent illicit weapons programs have been found, save for a specious reference to “Weapons of Mass Destruction-related program activities” (George W. Bush 3), prompting a noisome revision of the United States’ motivations for invading Iraq, namely the removal of the tyrannical Hussein and the installation of democracy and its incumbent responsibilities of self-determination for the Iraqi people. These are perfectly valid reasons, but unacceptable ex posto facto. Journalist Christopher Hitchens cites with some vindication the story of Mahdi Obeidi, a senior scientist under Hussein, who was ordered in 1991 to bury in his backyard the components of a gas centrifuge, an item used for uranium enrichment (Love 464). Hitchens seems to view this as proof positive that Hussein intended to become a nuclear power, but in all fairness there are a number of other rogue states—North Korea being the primary example—with weapon programs considerably more advanced than the buried bits of a centrifuge, but this does not provide a pretext for unilateral invasion. If it did, the United States would have the ludicrous responsibility of toppling governments all across the Eastern hemisphere.

The soi-disant “coalition of the willing” announced by Colin Powell just before the invasion was a motley collection of member nations whose roll included social democracies such as Britain and Denmark as well as less illustrious states like Uzbekistan, which harbors a repressive dictator of its own. Notably absent were any important nations of the Middle East, even those which had sided with the United States in the first Gulf War. It need hardly be stated that the United States’ essentially unilateral aggression against Iraq only exacerbated the region’s antipathy for the former’s continued support of the “Zionist entity” of Israel, but in much of Europe as well, public opinion took on a veritable distaste for America—a nation which had, less than two years prior, the sympathy and support of the entire developed world (Schifferes 2-3).

The ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in their country was nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” (11) was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be, however: coalition forces were in some cases greeted with joy and gratitude (Hitchens, “How to Ruin” 2); in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation languished and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a malevolent despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy, civil war, and a devastated infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing violence was to the architects of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, [...] Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46). Except perhaps among the Baathist elite, there was no ambivalence about Saddam Hussein: on the subject of their dictator, most Iraqis could agree that he was a repressive, megalomaniacal tyrant with a brutish, iron-fisted regime reminiscent of the nadir of Stalinism. His tyranny, however, was the only thing holding the country together: no collective “Iraqi” identity graced the arbitrary boundaries set by the British in 1917; no religious harmony united the fiercely-opposed Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish communities.

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many respects a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam—his multi-billion-dollar expenditures for his war with Iran in the 1980s having largely bankrupted the nation—but also the United Nations and the United States by proxy, whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward; Hussein, though his government was more or less secular, had used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shi’ites and Sunnis (as well as the Kurds and the Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (Garrels 55). What little was imported into Iraq was the result of the United Nations “Oil for Food” program, which died a messy death in 2003 with the start of the invasion and charges of corruption, the truth and impact of which will vary depending on the source. All told, something approaching $65 billion worth of oil was sold in exchange for basic necessities like food; as much as $1.8 billion may have been lost in kickbacks and other schemes by Saddam (Langenkamp 1).

This legacy of corruption would continue even well into the Iraq War, but it would unfortunately be perpetrated by American companies serving as third-party contractors in the rebuilding process. As early as 2004, reports of mismanaged property, missing funds, and fiduciary misconduct were being leveled at contractors such as Halliburton and its business unit, Kellogg Brown & Root. Regardless of the implications of suspicious business connections (some of which were facile and others of which are the vagaries of American politics), the financial management of the U.N.-created “Development Fund” and the billions of tax dollars being funneled into reconstruction seemed a monument to inefficiency and waste (Miller 188-189). In the case of the much-maligned Halliburton, T. Christian Miller writes “The company delivered, but wasted a lot of money doing it” (82). Clearly, there seemed to be no coherent vision for Iraq’s future, nor any sort of comprehensive oversight of the literal warzone pursuant to Hussein’s involuntary abdication. None of the ensuing chaos mitigated the fears and suspicions of the war’s opponents, and the fact that the United States’ immediate priority in post-coup Iraq were the Oil Ministry fostered much distrust among already-ambivalent Iraqis (Garrels 202). Hitchens asserts that oil is, in fact, worth fighting over (“Fault Lines”), and his point is of course true in practical terms: the United States feared that retreating hostile forces would set fire to oil fields and detonate oil reserves, bruising the international market and introducing an enormous logistical problem as it did in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (Garrels 126). The lack of a simple good/evil binary in Iraq—despite the best efforts of certain ideologues to convince Americans otherwise—makes it impossible to successfully balance the necessities of realpolitik with the sort of public relations campaign that the region’s inherent anti-westernism would require of the occupying powers.

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s sudden and violent transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion: even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans, the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (Garrels 26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party soundbytes with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why was the United States not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes. Importantly, U.N. embargoes tended to hurt only the general populace of Iraq: for loyal Party members, money and comfort was still no issue: Garrels makes mention of dealerships selling expensive Mercedes which must only be patronized by oil barons and Baathist elites (53). “While this family [with whom Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

The American motivation for attack remains a problem that hasn’t been explained away by the President’s on-camera jingoism: he may have convinced a slim majority of Americans to support his politics, but the situation in Iraq has deteriorated in complete disregard of Bush’s high ideals. Whence, then, the supposition of America’s legitimacy as a liberating power, especially after half a century of careful political tiptoeing? Hitchens proposes four criteria by which a nation forfeits its sovereignty, submitting as well that Iraq met all four prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The first is invading sovereign neighbors, as was the case with Kuwait in the first Gulf War; the second is genocide, as was again the case with the state-ordered massacre of Kurdish villages; the third is the violation of nonproliferation treaties, which Iraq’s clandestine attempts at a nuclear program ostensibly indicate; the fourth and final is the state sponsorship of international “gangsterism,” which Iraq is supposed to have done in a variety of ways (“Fault Lines”). The problem with Hitchens’ assessment is that the sparse evidence for recent WMD research and manufacturing requires a rather great leap to assume an explicit violation of nonproliferation treaties; the fourth item, as well, is famously false insofar as the 9/11 Commission Report found no evident link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (334), though likely true in that Iraq was and still is a nesting ground for terrorism. The implicit problem, however, is that there are a great many countries in the region which abet “gangsterism”—for instance, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran—as well as one infamous example—Iran—which claims to have not a single, disassembled centrifuge but rather 3,000 fully functional ones (“Iran” 1).

Working under the assumption that Iraq was indeed culpable for all the requisite trespasses, and the United States was justified in its military action, however premeditated,—this is not necessarily a difficult stretch to make—cognizant lookers-on must still then question not the purported moral authority or practical necessity of invasion, but the relative insouciance with which it was executed. Garrels make a critical point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty but deep-rooted religious rivalries more at home in the Dark Ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern by the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate. Like the failed “Hearts and Minds” campaign in South Viet Nam during the 1960s and 70s, winning a foreign war has as much to do with popular appeal as it does with military strategy. It seems as though the more effectively the military does its job of rooting out the phantom of terrorism, the further Iraqis are estranged from the ostensible benevolence of the West. The very idea of popularity seems to have been a foregone conclusion inside of a year: Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek said, “The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but that’s not the point. Their fighting force is based on a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s gang of enforcers. [...] For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda victories every time Americans break their own codes of warfare” (35). With the spectre of Abu Ghraib still looming, the political and civil-rights limbo of Guantanamo Bay still festering, and the historic free elections deepening the cleft of religious and cultural divides with political power, it seems unlikely that comprehensive peace is an implausible goal under the current circumstances—so say Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s close friend and advisor, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor and noted Cold War historian. Fundamentally changing the odds in Iraq would require either a commitment of money and troops far beyond the pale of Americans’ current mood or a change of paradigm with regard to control of operations (A12).

Barring a semantic quarrel, it would be accurate to call the war in Iraq so far a “failure” insofar as it has not produced any of the desired dividends: lasting peace, stable oil, democratic influence, or efficacious disarmament. The only considerable goals which have been achieved are the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the implementation of divisive elections. Understandably, the great hope for the Middle East is not a short-term armistice, but rather a long-term process whereby the benefits of secularism, self-governance, and civil liberty will osmose through the Arabian peninsula; however, the approach to the War in Iraq, in all its various and sundry guises, critically misunderstood what was plain as vanilla to anyone familiar with the region. Garrels summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East: there is no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there, as the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though they are entirely clear to its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the War in Iraq has become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

Works Cited

• Bush, George, and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Bush, George W. “State of the Union.” Washington, D.C. 20 Jan. 2004. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html>.
• Cheney, Dick. Interview. Meet the Press. MSNBC. 14 Sep. 2006. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/>.
• Hitchens, Christopher. “How to Ruin an Occupation.” Slate 5 July 2005. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.slate.com/id/2121996>.
• —. Love, Poverty, and War. New York: Nation Books, 2004.
• —. “Fault Lines: Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine and The Nation.” Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund, Berkley. 8 Dec. 2002.
• “Iran ‘enters new nuclear phase’” BBC News 9 Apr. 2007. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6538957.stm>.
• Langenkamp, R. Dobie. “Putting Oil-for-Food in Perspective.” Jurist. 2 Nov. 2005. University of Pittsburgh School of Law. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2005/11/putting-oil-for-food-in-perspective.php>.
• Miller, T. Christian. Blood Money. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
• National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
• Nordland, Rob, and Babak Dehghanpisheh. “Rules of Engagement.” Newsweek 29 Nov. 2004: 34-36.
• Priest, Dana, and Robin Wright. “Scowcroft Skeptical Vote Will Stabilize Iraq.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2005: A12.
• Schifferes, Steve. “US names ‘coalition of the willing’” BBC News 18 Mar. 2003. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm>.

Love, Poverty, and War by Christopher Hitchens

Anyone who’s frequented my blog to any significant degree knows that I am (mostly) a fan of Christopher Hitchens. I find him an excellent journalist, as well as a man of scruples, a great lover/scholar of literature, an iconoclast of the highest order, and an all-around interesting writer. Most importantly, he neither requests nor offers any alliances except to the principles he holds dear: liberty, civil liberty, intellectual vigor, and the rooting out of corruption.

Of late, you might know Hitchens for his unapologetic support of the invasion of Iraq. He’s been a talking head on a variety of networks—FNC included—to proffer his justifications for the war. But Hitchens has been around a long time: you might recall his screed against Mother Teresa, his contempt for Bill Clinton, or his struggle to oust and prosecute Henry Kissinger for war crimes (all three of this subjects have been tackled in books by Hitchens). He’s written in a variety of contexts—more than I ever realized—and this collection of essays seeks to offer a decent cross section of that canon.

The book, as the title might indicate, is divided into three sections.

1. Love • This section consists mostly of Hitchens’ passions—that is, reviews of famous literature or books or history. It begins with a lengthy essay about Winston Churchill (through the lens of several biographies and books and history) written for Atlantic Monthly. It continues along that vein, jumping from introductions of Huxley’s Brave New World to contextual criticism of Rudyard Kipling, to reviews of other literary criticism. It spans a wide gamut, but it’s a side of Hitchens that is rarely seen except to owners of n^th-anniversary reprints of select novels or subscribers to Atlantic Monthly or a ragtag collection of literary journals. It’s not the best lit-crit I’ve ever read, but it’s still damned interesting.
   • Americana • As a postscript to the “Love” section is a series of articles dealing specifically with American culture. One long essay, I believe for Harper’s, recalls Hitchens’ journey across historic Route 66 in a Corvette, and reminds me more of Bill Bryon’s The Lost Continent than anything by Hitchens.
2. Poverty • This section is a catch-all for any of Hitchens’ polemics that aren’t Iraq-related. A screed against Mother Teresa, for instance, as well as an extraordinarily poignant piece about an execution he witnessed in Missouri (and of course capital punishment in general). These are some of his most reflective pieces, even if they contain at points a fair amount of ire. Remember that Hitchens isn’t one to pull any punches.
3. War • “War” is, as one might imagine, predicated entirely upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it is further bifurcated into a “Before September” section, which consists largely of early-90s pieces about the first Gulf War—and a notable argument about Montenegro during the conflict in Yugoslavia—, and an “After September,” which chronicles some of Hitchens more immediate responses to the attack, more measured pieces months later advocating military responses, and finally a few articles dealing with the invasion of Iraq.

I’m sorry to say that the final essay, for all its merits, strikes me as a somewhat jingoistic, “Iraq: A Country on the Move!” sort of fluff piece. It’s a soft end, I think, and not one that holds up well several years later, when prospects aren’t as bright and sunny as Hitchens makes them out to be. Still and all, one has to respect Hitchens’ clarity of argument—I find that my own opinions have been tempered somewhat by his writing—and the nuance and skill with which he approaches his subject. Love, Poverty, and War is a mere sampling of Hitchens’ incredible archives, but it’s the sort of compilation I’ve been looking for, since I’m not a regular reader of anything but his Slate articles. If you’re a Hitchens fan, or just want to see what he has to say, give this one a chance.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

My introduction to Dave Eggers was his startling semiautobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a stupendous and rather abstruse bit of metafiction. I must say that I was a little surprised to see Eggers tackle a subject like the Sudanese civil war–not that I doubt his multiculturalism or his sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate, but I was always under the impression that Eggers’ forte was firmly in the school of Euro-American esotery.

It is difficult enough to raise awareness about the conflict in Sudan (Darfur, specifically) today, but even fewer people know that today’s problems actually follow the violent, protracted civil war that raged in the late 80s and early 90s in Sudan. I won’t bore you with the specifics: look it up if you’re curious–better yet, read this book. Eggers’ What is the What is based on the real-life struggles of Valentino Achak Deng, an honest-to-goodness Sudanese refugee who is friends with the author. I should stress, as the author does, that What is the What is fiction: a novel built upon a framework of stories told to Eggers by the real Deng over a period of years. this makes the book straddle an odd sort of state between fiction and nonfiction—Eggers exploits this to weave a tale that is patently not postmodernism or metafiction, but a sort of plaintive mourning for the sorry state of Sudan and the plight of Sudanese refugees in America. The frame narrative—Valentino in present-day Atlanta–acts as a sort of ironic foil for the main character’s flashbacks that detail everything from the burning of his village to the mass exodus of Dinka children, to his time in a refugee camp, to his resettlement in America. I say ironic because Eggers insists on drawing parallels between the sort of injustices a Sudanese refugee faces in an unforgiving American city: he has a job, attends school, and has experienced much generosity, but the book opens with his being held hostage in an apartment while two African Americans loot his belongings. Later, at the hospital, he waits for aid, feeling overlooked and abused. The paralles are subtle, but Eggers is too careful a writer for it to be coincidence.

What I think is most impressive about this book is the difficulty in writing—as a hyperliterate white author—in the voice of a Sudanese refugee over a number of years, and moreover doing it with a fealty to the personality and understanding of the character. Having thought a lot lately about narrative voice and the assumptions of authorial narration, I noticed this in particular, because Eggers’ narration isn’t overly complex (ok, he slips sometimes, but not severely), as it shouldn’t be from the perspective of a young, uneducated Sudanese boy or an older and wiser but still naïe Sudanese man, yet he wields the relatively simple syntax and language that flexes its inherent power to move and affect the reader. It’s an impressive feat, truly.

I’m glad to see issues like this being brought up in “hip” fiction like this. It’s not an authority on the history of the Sudan, but it’s a powerful glimpse into the personal horrors of genocide and the opportunity for regrowth and regeneration.

The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

The Lemon Tree is a brave book: it seeks to distill the essence of almost a century of Palestinian conflict into a 300-page of novelized nonfiction. In this, I think, it succeeds rather admirably, which is perhaps all I need to say about it.

Tolan centers this mix of history and narrative around two characters: Bashir, the son of a displaced Palestinian family, and Dalia, the daughter of Bulgarian Jews who inhabited Bashir’s former house in al-Ramla when the Arabs were driven out under the orders of Yitzhak Rabin. To be quite honest, I could do without this “personal touch,” because at time it approaches the maudlin–the last chapter, particular, is somewhat groan-worthy.

But Tolan’s history is quite good, and I commend him on what appears to me to be a balanced and straightforward look at the long conflict. I won’t summarize it here for you: either you know it already, or you should be reading the book. However, the depth of information, and the scope of Tolan’s history, is wonderful: it begins with Theodor Herzl’s original 19th-century Zionist movement, moves forward into the Balfour Declaration and the relatively peaceful influx of European Jews into Palestine, focuses especially on the post-Holocaust diaspora of European Jews which underscored the apparent necessity of a Jewish state, and then gets into the nitty-gritty of the grievous missteps that have seemed to plague the region ever since.

If nothing else, The Lemon Tree is an excellent primer on the vagaries of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I recommend it to any and all.

Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels

Mere days ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associating maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Baghdad from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and its message seems congruent with the cries that we’ve been hearing ever since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. I believe that most important “string”—if I may borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in Naked in Baghdad is the occasional reference to the author’s time in the Soviet Union during its declining years. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20^th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The tragic prescience of Garrels’ reporting is the most revealing aspect of her story: the ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in the country is nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that we would be “greeted as liberators,” was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be: U.S. Soldiers were in some cases greeted with some joy and gratitude; in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation stretched on and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy and a crumbled infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing civil war was to the designers of Operation: Enduring Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, he continues in his very broken English, Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46).

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many cases a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam, for his multi-billion-dollar expenditures on his war with Iran in the 1980s, but also the U.S./U.N., whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward, and Hussein, though his government is more or less secular, has used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shiites and Sunnis (and Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (55).

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion—even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans—the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party lines with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why the U.S. not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes1. “While this family [with which Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

Garrels’ book, when read in 2007, is an exercise in dramatic irony. Her prescient observations, mere likelihoods at the time of writing, are to modern readers foreshadowing of the most potent sort. History has proven most of Garrels’ conclusions correct, but it is all the more foreboding that it has done so: her point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, is that there are shades of Iraq to be teased from so many lessons learned in the past, and that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty religious rivalries more at home in the dark ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern from the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate.

Garrels herself summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East. There’s no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there: the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though it is entirely clear its its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the war in Iraq is become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

In all the years I’ve been reading Bill Bryson, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard or read anyone compare him to Robert Byron, the famed travel writers in the 1930s who died during the war. He takes a similarly anecdotal approach to his writing, and with an acerbity that puts Bryson to shame.

The Road to Oxiana documents British journalist Robert Byron’s trip through the Middle East, hitting all of the major places—Tehran, Beirut, Palestine, &c.. Importantly, Byron is there only because of his fascination with Middle Eastern architecture—the only parts of the book, in fact, where his tone is anything but contemptuous is when he’s covering just such a topic—and in fact has little patience for either the native inhabitants or the European rulers (this book takes place after the post-war division of the region among various European powers: in fact, since a lot of Byron’s interactions are with the foreign inhabitants, the Middle East hardly seems as though it’s Middle Eastern. It’s like a great big block party for the English and French.

What really grabs me about The Road to Oxiana is what a smörgåsbord of styles Byron uses, and his sheer love of rhetorical invention. The book veers from terse journal-style recordkeeping, to long play-style passages which use musical notation to show volume changes, to winding descriptions of edifices where Byron gets downright wondrous.

The book is, essentially, travel writing. Thus, it may appeal to fans of the genre: my love of Bill Bryson might be part of the reason why The Road of Oxiana resonated with me, although Byron is significantly more acerbic than Bryson ever gets, and this constant disparagement of everything and everyone ceases to be amusing and becomes trying very early on. It is no wonder that Byron had very few friends to mourn him when he was killed during WWII. It is only through the efforts of modern travel writers that this book is available at all: Paul Fussell, who provides the introduction to the book, was instrumental in its rerelease in the early 1980s. One can see how the appeal of a book about the Middle East—especially the Middle East circa 1933—would wane somewhat in modern America, but the book really is a jewel of writing, filled with language both hilarious and beautiful.

Darfur Diaries by Jen Marlowe

Darfur Diaries is actually more famous as a documentary film than as a book. Three twenty-somethings venture into Sudan at the height of the violence there to interview refugees and get a clear, non-governmental picture as to what’s going on there. This book was written after the success of the movie, and while some of the material overlaps, it’s much more of a personal narrative than the movie’s interview format.

The book paints a very different picture than most Westerners get from the news. All of those interviewed unequivocally blame Omar Bashir (the current president of Sudan, who took power in a 1989 coup d’état) for everything, claiming that he cynically uses religion as a wedge in order to drive tribal peoples from the land and populate it with loyal Arabs.

Sudan is in many ways an extremely odd country. It’s one of very few African states that are predominantly Muslim (the rest is tribal animism and perhaps 5% Christianity), and it is so despite having an almost entirely black population. It has over 40 million people, lots of different tribes, and people speak either Arabic or a tribal language. From 1983 until just relatively recently, it was mired in the longest civil war in African history, so it’s no stranger to conflict, but the last violence is a different beast entirely.

One would think, after the disaster than Rwanda became in 1994, that the United States would be quicker to act in what is a clear case of genocide, but there are two problems: China and Russia. The former does a lot of business buying oil from the Sudanese government, and are happy as long as it keeps flowing, regardless of Bashir’s other actions. The latter continues to make money by selling crappy Soviet-era military equipment to the Sudanese government, which then arms the Janjaweed militia and uses planes called Antonovs to bomb Darfurian villages.

It’s a real shame. I’m not sure that this book really offers much that the film can’t, but if you’re the certain who prefers a bit more backstory (the film gives virtually none), the book might be a better choice. On general principle, I think it’s about as close as we’re going to get to an in-depth look at what life is really like among the repressed population of Darfur.